Stacy Horn

I’m participating in a symposium at Harvard University, sponsored by the Harvard Music Department. John Maclay, the director of The Choral Society of Grace Church, and I will be talking about singing and community. From their program:

“Exploring the neurological, therapeutic, and social benefits of community singing. Musicians, researchers, and disability advocates will explore the intersections of music and disability, neuroscience, wellness, and community. Renowned conductor, composer, and educator, Alice Parker, and Joyful Noise, a chorus of adults with significant physical and/or neurological disabilities, will lead symposium attendees in song.”

Of course I’m nervous and stressing out about it. Harvard! Smart people! And you know how they got to be so smart, right? By turning into brain-eating zombies from time to time. I used to live in Cambridge, I’ve personally witnessed the occasional slaughter. And I also used to work at Harvard, at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. So, basically I’m the help.

A naked woman riding some sort of sea serpent. This is just a tad pornographic, I think.

I turned on the news. CNN was, as usual, reporting endlessly but saying nothing new about missing flight MH370. And, as usual, they were flashing the now meaningless, comical words “Breaking News.” It’s absolutely maddening. I still turn on CCN first because it used to be such a great, sober, informative news channel.

I switched to the new Ronan Farrow show on MSNBC. He was talking about food drops in Sudan. I learned something! The rest of the show was as informative. I’ve watched a few times before. Unfortunately, he’s on at an hour when my tv is rarely on. When I’ve seen him though, he always manages to explain and report while assuming you know nothing, which I usually don’t, but he doesn’t talk to you like you haven’t gone to school past the 5th grade.

So there’s him, Rachel Maddow, and the BBC. I keep forgetting to go back to the radio, that’s probably still good. And of course there’s the internets! I had hopes for the new Al Jazeera news channel, but the few times I watched I didn’t get the range that I’d hoped for. Although I remember catching a few minutes of a piece about the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. They said they had evidence that Iran, not Libya, was behind the bombing. It was like, 2am or something, and I fell asleep, missing what that evidence was. But when I woke up I expected to see a big reaction to the piece but there was nothing. ZERO. That was a while ago too and still nothing. Has anyone looked into their claims?

Children playing with bubbles in Washington Square Park.

We had an extra choir rehearsal this afternoon. This was for the people who have missed rehearsals and/or need extra help and we have a couple of them every semester. Everyone needs extra help this semester though, because what we’re singing is so challenging. (I’m looking at you, Charles Ives, and your Psalm 90. Oh, I just read that he suffered from anxiety attacks. Okay, I forgive him for the challenging music. Anxiety attacks are the worst thing in the world, I used to get them when I was in my twenties. If you’ve never had them, you just don’t know. They are horrible.)

On the way to practice I passed by pigeon man in Washington Square Park.

And on the way back, on 14th Street, I met a singer/musician named SK. He told me to take his picture because he’s going to be famous someday. I’m rooting for you, SK!

What does it say about me that I took more pictures of turtles than people while walking home through Central Park?? (I like turtles. I should try to find a picture I took of turtles 30 years ago. There were a bunch of them in the church garden behind the apartment where I lived at the time. Weird!)

The same turtles, pulled back.

While there are people in this shot I took it because of the trees, and the fact that a scene from the movie The Happening was shot here. A movie I enjoyed even though one of the stars didn’t! Mark Wahlberg: “it was a really bad movie… Fuck it. It is what it is. Fucking trees, man. The plants. Fuck it. You can’t blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher. At least I wasn’t playing a cop or a crook.”

Every once in a while I look up and see a plane making what looks to me like a way-too-steep climb. I learned how to fly, but that was just a teeny single engine plane and it was the 1970’s. Maybe a climb like this is perfectly acceptable. But I see this and I think something urgent is happening. Like, maybe this is a fighter jet and it’s way … to fight something.